These 'Frankenstein' buildings show how wood can make an old building new again

"Old, poorly insulated, and inadequate for the technical demands of today's research, it seemed like too steep a challenge to repurpose, says Tom Davies, the school's Executive Director of Planning, Design, and Construction. Especially after a new science center opened on campus in 2020. "It was a stranded asset with essentially no value," he says. "But what our consultants were able to show is that it does have quite a bit of value.""

"In the course of exploring options, engineers and the architectural team at Herzog & de Meuron devised a different future for the building, firmly rooted in its past. They decided that the hefty concrete frame could be stripped down, and two comparatively lightweight floors of mass timber could be added on top to create additional space. This approach, which stays within the school's commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, was approved,"

"He believes there's extensive opportunity in this form of mass timber top-off, but there's simply not enough familiarity with this material, or enough examples, to spur additional investment and development. Engineers like Den Herder have concluded that much of the older building stock in big cities, built with solid foundations able to hold additional weight, could easily support a few additional floors, especially if they were constructed of more lightweight material."

Amherst College transformed an aging, underused concrete science building into a student center by retaining and strengthening its concrete frame and adding two lightweight mass timber floors. The existing concrete frame was stripped and repurposed rather than demolished, preserving embodied energy and meeting campus carbon-reduction goals. Engineers and Herzog & de Meuron designed the top‑off to create additional space while staying within structural limits. The approach revealed substantial latent value in an otherwise stranded asset and yielded a timeline to reopen as a student center in fall 2026. The project illustrates found capacity potential in older buildings for sustainable vertical expansion.

Read at Fast Company